Friends for Youth named a Service Enterprise!

Exciting news! Friends for Youth is among the first nonprofits in the state to be certified as a "Service Enterprise" by The Volunteer Center and CaliforniaVolunteers! 

Research reveals that only about 15% of all nonprofits are Service Enterprises. This new certification will help volunteers direct their hours and donors direct their dollars to organizations that are maximizing effectiveness, efficiency, and impact. 

Following a rigorous diagnostic and evaluation process, Friends for Youth demonstrated high marks across all metrics: leadership support, training, onboarding, tech & communication, partnering, outreach & funding, tracking & evaluation, and resource allocation. 

We share this honor with all members of the Friends for Youth organization. Thank you to everyone for helping us achieve our mission of creating quality mentoring relationships for youth who need them most.

Friends For Youth makes an appearence at Adobe

--> This past Tuesday Friends for Youth participated in a volunteer fair at our community partner Adobe. We were glad for the opportunity to meet potential mentors at Adobe's San Jose campus! We are in need particularly of male volunteers and were not disappointed. We were inundated with many questions and were happy to answer all. We were greatly delighted at the pleasant reception we received and the opportunity to spread the word about Friends for Youth. Friends for Youth has several Adobe employees who are current mentors, and we hope to recruit a few more!

 

Friends for Youth At Genentech

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Last week Friends For Youth participated in the Genentech Give Back Week, a special week devoted to employee volunteerism. We met with our group of Genentech volunteers and split into teams to spend the afternoon canvassing the North Peninsula communities in order to post as many mentor recruitment fliers as possible. Friends for Youth is especially in need of male volunteers in the Northern San Mateo County to match with the boys on our waiting list, and this activity will undoubtedly help us to spread the word about the need for mentors. Afterward we all got together for some refreshments back at Genentech and celebrated our accomplishments.

Thank you to everyone who came out to join us and to the many local businesses who agreed to post our fliers. Friends for Youth is grateful for the chance to reach out to the community in partnership with Genentech.

Friends for Youth at Microsoft!

Last week Friends For Youth attended a two part volunteer fair at Microsoft's Mountain View and Sunnyvale campuses. We had the chance to reach out to our potential South Bay mentors, which was an exciting prospect. In addition to meeting community-minded Microsoft employees, we also took the opportunity to connect with the other nonprofits at the fair. Thanks Microsoft for making these connections possible!

Mentoring Journal – See What’s New!

We just received the third printing of our highly requested Mentoring Journals, so they’re back in stock! For this version, we’ve simplified the instructions page and included new illustrations to give hints about using pages, updated our 101 Simple Activities List, added a new activity about planning (or just thinking about) your future, and reduced the pocket pages to just one, creating a leaner Mentoring Journal.

For those who are new to the Mentoring Journal  this resource offers mentoring matches a structured yet flexible format to enjoy meaningful activities together, increasing the opportunity for meaningful interactions. Sold in sets of two so each mentor and mentee receive their own, by using the Mentoring Journals,  they get a reflective, creative and FUN experience; chances to contribute to each other’s Mentoring Journal; and the opportunity to turn memories of a year into memories for a lifetime.

Program staff can also benefit: when your mentors and mentees use Mentoring Journals, your program gets an instrument for monitoring meetings, a tool to assess relationship satisfaction, an opportunity to measure activity levels, and a method to align individual match goals with your overall program goals.

Good for both 12-month and school year matches, the Mentoring Journal is divided into four sections, with activities that increase in interaction and sharing as the match progresses through the year.

To celebrate this new version, we’re offering 10% off any orders until August 31, 2013. When ordering online, use the promo code NEW2013 to receive your discounted price.

For more information, see our webpage about the Mentoring Journals, view a recorded webinar or view the slides from the webinar illustrating the resource, or go to our storefront to order Mentoring Journals online.